Somewhere in the lower bowl of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome is where Ashley Harrison predicted she’d spend Monday evening, the night before her 23rd birthday. She already had told her boyfriend, Alabama long snapper Carson Tinker, to get ready because the couple would be celebrating in the Crescent City, her original hometown.

Brett Duke/The Times-PicayuneDarlene Harrison holds a picture of her daughter, Ashley Therese Perret Harrison, with her parents Marion and Annette Perret in the background of her parents' Kenner home. Ashley Harrison, girlfriend of Alabama long snapper Carson Tinker, died in Tuscaloosa during a tornado last April.

She had called her parents, Darlene and David Harrison, too, and told them to expect to be in New Orleans as well — because the Crimson Tide was destined to play in the BCS championship game this season.

Ashley, whose family is from New Orleans and who lived in Kenner before the family moved to Dallas when she was 3, was one of seven Alabama students killed by the twister.

She was at Carson’s house when the tornado hit. Carson was hospitalized after being thrown nearly 50 feet when the twister ripped through his home.

“She told him they’d be here for her birthday,” Darlene Harrison said. “He didn’t believe her. He said it was too early to talk about playing in the championship.”

It’s not too early now.

Carson has recovered from his tornado injuries well enough to help the second-ranked Crimson Tide reach Monday night’s BCS championship game against No. 1 LSU at the Superdome.

And to help keep Ashley’s prophecy of a homecoming for the BCS game alive, Carson helped talk Alabama Athletic Director Mal Moore into making available a pair of tickets that the Harrisons were able to purchase.

Having Ashley’s family in the stands will help him, Carson said.

He still deals with the emotional scars left by the EF4 twister and shies away from conversations about that fateful day.

“I don’t really want to talk about that kind of stuff,” he said.

The nightmare, though, won’t go away.

Seeking shelter

With Mother Nature spinning in their direction on that spring day, Ashley was watching television with Carson’s two roommates, Alan Estis and Payton Holley, oblivious to the impending danger.

Brett Duke/The Times-PicayuneAshley Harrison and Carson Tinker

But a weatherman soon put them on alert.

Carson and Payton looked to the heavens for signs of funnel clouds. They saw none.

Meanwhile, Ashley called home to Dallas. She told her mother about the weatherman’s warning.

Darlene grew concerned about her only child. Ashley insisted they’d be fine.

“We are getting ready to get in the closet,” Ashley said. “We are OK. We love you.”

“Are you sure?” her mother asked.

Ashley giggled.

She figured she, Carson, his roommates and their two dogs would take cover as a precaution but the storm would miss them.

A minute after Ashley hung up and the closet door closed, the wind started swirling. It lifted a pickup truck and twirled in the direction of Tinker’s home.

At about 6 p.m., David Harrison called his daughter to check up on her. No answer.

Less than an hour later, a friend of the Harrison family called asking where Ashley was. Reports of a tornado touching down in Tuscaloosa had begun to circulate.

Darlene called Carson. Again, no answer.

Panic set in.

Where was Ashley? Why wasn’t she answering the phone? Was she in the tornado’s path?

There was no way for the Harrisons to know that an EF4 twister with winds of 190 mph had swept directly through the neighborhood.

Carson hugged Ashley tightly while reassuring her everything would be just fine.

But the winds picked up, bringing with them a deafening whistle.

The house began to tear away from its foundation.

The four of them and the two dogs, cowering in the closet, bottle rocketed out of the house, flying like rag dolls wherever the winds would take them.

Carson landed in a field about 100 yards away and was unconscious. His roommates were thrown out of the house as well. The three survived. Carson suffered a concussion, broken wrist and deep gash on his ankle.

Once Carson came through, he began to search for Ashley, shouting her name as he shuffled through debris.

The Harrisons didn’t know what was going on. But they knew they had to find their daughter.

Harrison family photoOnly bricks and a lone stoop remain after a deadly April tornado struck in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Ashley Harrison was in the house with her boyfriend, Carson Tinker, and his two roommates.

With no ticket or no idea of the flight schedule, the Harrisons left their Dallas-area home and set off for the airport.

Darlene placed a call to a family friend, a former executive at Southwest Airlines. He said he’d do what he could to get them to Alabama that night, but the last plane was leaving in just minutes.

David floored it. An airport employee, obviously aware of the situation, held the plane up.

Meanwhile, Darlene’s father, Marion Perret, and her brother, Marion II, hopped into a truck and hightailed it out of New Orleans.

The Harrisons made it to Tuscaloosa at 11 p.m. The Perrets made it soon after.

The streets were dark. There was no power. Remnants of the tornado were sprawled about, making roads impassable.

The family went to the hospital, but they were rebuffed. Officials weren’t letting visitors in.

Marion II, a Gretna police officer, had a plan. He went to his vehicle, pulled on a police vest and walked in.

He started to ask about Ashley Harrison, a student at Alabama who was in the path of the tornado. No one had heard of her.

He checked room after room. No luck.

Finally, he saw Carson, who still hadn’t heard from or seen Ashley.

Some college students suggested they check the morgue.

Once the family arrived at the morgue, employees there said to come back Monday when the coroner, whose own house had been in the tornado’s path, was back at work.

Running out of options, they tried the police station. But it had been destroyed.

“Since she wasn’t at the hospital or any of the triages and nobody at the morgue could find her, we assumed that she was still at the scene,” Marion II said.

So the Perrets went into the destruction, leaving the Harrisons to continue to check with the morgue and hospital.

Marion II ran into two firemen. They used infrared light to search in the pitch of night. All they found were the two dogs that had been in the closest.

The firefighters were almost certain Ashley was among the rubble. The family and some of Ashley’s friends searched through the night.

By the morning, a police officer had arrived at the site. He carried a digital camera.

A body of a young female who had suffered a broken neck and died had been found by a neighbor’s dog in a field 65 yards from the house, moments after Carson and his roommates were brought to the hospital.

The officer believed it could be Ashley. It was.

Ashley had been at the morgue the whole time. She was stacked among bodies, in bag No. 17.

“I went down there (to the morgue) first because I didn’t know what we would find,” Marion II said. “It’s a bad situation anyway you slice it. But this other girl was messed up really bad. But Ashley was like she was sleeping. I was so relieved.”

The next day, the family had a visitation in Tuscaloosa. Alabama Coach Nick Saban and his daughter, Kristen, a sorority sister of Ashley’s, attended.

Doctors wouldn’t release Carson to attend the service. But he insisted on being there.

“He didn’t believe she was dead,” Darlene said. “He wanted to see her. So they brought him in an ambulance, strapped to a gurney.”

Carrying the legacy

As a way of coping with the Ashley’s death, Carson’s doctors said he should open up about his loss.

They even suggested he give speeches about the tragedy.

But he couldn’t do it. He tears up and loses his thoughts when he has to relive April 27.

Instead, he began giving motivational speeches, which were geared to living for the future, not about death and loss.

Churches he spoke to raised offerings for him. But Carson, a junior from Murfreesboro, Tenn., turned the cash down.

He asked that it go to the scholarship funds that have been set up in honor of Ashley, who graduated posthumously in August.

After Ashley’s death, the University of Alabama set up a scholarship in her name, as did her high school in Dallas, Ursuline Academy, and her sorority, Phi Mu.

In all, there are four scholarships in Ashley’s name, amounting to more than $70,000.

At Carson’s locker at Bryant-Denny Stadium on the Alabama campus, a plaque has been mounted in Ashley’s memory.

On game days, Carson said, he thinks about her. He continues to try to live up to some of the expectations she had for him.

“She always wanted me to play my heart out,” Carson said, while fighting back tears. “She always told me she wanted me to play in the NFL. She always told me she wanted me to play for the Cowboys. I always keep that with me and hold on to that.”

Ashley and Carson met at a party about a year and a half ago.

At first, Carson thought Ashley was out of his league. But the two hit it off so well, the relationship grew serious.

Harrison brought Carson to New Orleans to meet her grandparents.

“She brought him here so we could pass judgment on him, so to speak, before she presented him to her mom and dad,” Marion Perret said.

The Harrisons knew the relationship was growing after Ashley found out Carson was the long snapper on the Alabama football team — she called her father, an avid sports fan.

“Dad,” Ashley said, “what’s a long snapper?”

Usually when Ashley brought a new boyfriend around, the Harrisons made bets to predict how long the courtship would last. David and Darlene would hold up their fingers to indicate the number of weeks they gave the relationship.

But when they met Carson, it was different.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, David, this one might work,’ ” Darlene said.

For Christmas, the couple exchanged gifts. Carson bought Ashley a Louis Vuitton purse, and she bought him a Louis Vuitton wallet.

In the wallet, Carson kept a letter Ashley had written him.

The wallet had been missing after the tornado. But in the days after the storm, it was found. All of his money and credit cards were missing.

The letter that Ashley ended by signing with a heart “Ash,” though, remained.